Typical SharePoint Project Part 1

Ok, you all know the recent typhoon of SharePoint projects.
Now, being a SharePoint consultant, there is often a dilemma of whether to follow the traditional waterfall model or to follow the new trendy agile model. Also, there is confusion at every stage that what are the best practices while implementing a typical SharePoint project. Well, there are not any. If there are some best practices, they often lead to more than one options.

And therefore, when it comes to SharePoint, we all know its totally a different ball game. There are so many factors associated with a single project that it becomes a rudimentary necessity to nail down the steps. If you are one of those confused guys wondering how to implement a SharePoint project, here is a simple How To :

1. Don’t decide to strictly follow any methodology by book – Be it Waterfall or Agile. First and foremost understand how your organization typically works. If you are comfortable with Agili’sh’ waterfall then there is no harm in following it. There are many organizations which use Agile terms while implementing a project, however they do it a waterfall way.

2. Prepare a SharePoint Governance Plan – We can write a whole book on this topic. Or we can just say, Keep it simple and sweet. Anyways, let’s just face it, SharePoint Governance is one of the most difficult topic when it comes to deciding what to and what not to. To define SharePoint Governance in simpler terms, we can say the following:

“SharePoint governance is all about People, Process and their respective mappings (Process mapping to People or vice versa)” Therefore, rather than dipping into the complex realms of Governance, just fix the following:

a) People – Identify the strategy team, technical team (scrum team if agile) and Business Single Point of Contacts
b) Process – Identify the key processes followed in your organization. For instance, data backup and retrieval policy, information security policy and map them one by one to the Out of the Box SharePoint capabilities. And off course document them!
c) Phew ! You have done the majority of Governance. Now prepare a release maintenance plan which fits the above people following the above processes For instance, SharePoint Scrum team needs to manage the release from test environment to LIVE/PROD environment and they need to make sure that the test environment is in sync with PROD

3. We are done with project methodology and the Governance. Now we need to nail down the road map of our SharePoint design. For this, prepare an Information Architecture diagram covering the following:

1. Number of site collection and web apps
2. Site map detailing number of publishing site, team sites, custom applications and my sites
3. Managed Metadata and Keywords required for the organization
4. Branding guidelines for the complete Information Architecture. One useful way of implement this could be – Branding your main publishing Intranet site as per the corporate guidelines. However, keep one extra color for team sites and project sites so that end user can differentiate between the types of sites just on the basis of this extra color

4. Lastly, you need to make sure that you are monitoring your infrastructure requirements on regular basis. With the advent of number of site collections and web apps, plus the storage required, you might require to scale your infrastructure. This typically also depends on your concurrent user load.

To be continued in part 2 explaining what can still go wrong